FORTRAN (was Re: indentation)

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Thu, 09 Dec 1999 16:47:37 -0700, "William B. Clodius"
<wclodius at lanl.gov> declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:


> Tim Peters may correct me on this, but I believe that all Fortran's up
> to Fortran 90 could be implemented with static allocation. It had no
> recursion and, in most respects, no dynamic allocation. The one tricky
> point in static allocation involves some usages of CHARACTER variables
> which result in expressions whose size can vary at runtime. However, I

	CHARACTER came in with FORTRAN 77. As I recall, the F77 standard
had a left-hand and right-hand definition; left-hand being the minimum
that had to be implemented to be considered F77, right-hand being the
full "standard" language.

	I believe even in the full F77, there were no real "varying"
CHARACTER types -- the closest being "character*(*)" which only applied
to arguments passed to a subroutine/function. The actual dimensions (*)
were still fixed when the actual variable is declared, and the bounds
were then passed along to the subroutine/function as part of the calling
mechanism (IE, not just the address of the variable, but a structure
containing length and pointer to storage).

> believe that the language defined a standard upper bound on the size of
> these expressions to allow static allocation in these cases. (No I can't

	I suspect the "left-hand" standard may have defined a MINIMUM
length for character data types.


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